GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 355387
File History Statistics for Baobab
Last modified: 2012-09-15 19:41:45 UTC
I would like to see further file analysis capabilities added to Baobab for the following: Statistics to provided information on most read and written files and directories; Last person to access files, with user names; Ability to record history of disk usage over time (possibly with graphs.) Perhaps integration with CVS could track file usage. Security would also need to be taken into account with regards to who would be able to view information about a file (presumably root and the file owner would be the main people.) The disk usage tool could possibly also show when an individual user is approaching quota threshold (if this has been activated by the system administrator.)
(Innocent and unrelated bystander chiming in) > Last person to access files, with user names; Currently, this isn't saved anywhere. To compute this reliably, you need to be the kernel, so this would imply kernel changes. This is of course not to say it won't ever happen, just to the implications clear. You could make a hack whereby you repeatedly poll `lsof', see which process has which files open, and use that to attribute accesses to process owners. It won't be perfectly reliable, but may be good for insecure purposes (i.e. you want to know who was looking at /usr/bin/bletch/lib/no_user_should_go_here). > Statistics to provided information on most read and written files and directories; Again, this is not something that's stored, and again you need to be the kernel to determine this accurately. However, you can assume yourself out of the problem: if reads and writes are evenly spaced out in time, most recently read is likely to be most often read, and similarly for writes. Depending on your purposes, this may or may not be good enough. > Ability to record history of disk usage over time (possibly with graphs.) [and something with quotase] This is easy and without dramatic ramifications, in principle ;) > [Integration with CVS] I can't imagine which files you want to keep multiple versions of. Isn't usage information best kept in a log? If you want all your files CVS'd, look into versioned file systems. > [Security] I'd try letting the policy be expressed via chmod bits rather than be dictated from above via hardcoding it. Of course, what would a sane default be? Your suggestion of root+owner might be fine, or root only might be the right answer.
First of all sorry for the looooong silence on this report. Unfortunately it is time to face the fact that these features will not be part of the designed goals of baobab for the forseeable future.